Editor's Commentary

Editor’s Commentary Why Chicanos Could Not Be Beat Chon A. Nodega In 1959, pull My Daisy ushered in a brief period of underground film rooted in Beat aesthetics-with its inherent clash between disengagement and celebrity, spontaneity and pos- ing. Produced by Robert Frank and Albert Leslie, the film depicts a rather romantic and cliched slice-of-bohemian-lifethat features Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky as well as a voice over narration by Jack Kerouac. The film- together with John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959)-was a commercial and critical success, inspiring Hollywood knock-offs as well as independent feature production from Shirley Clarke to Andy Warhol (James 1989; Tyler 1995). In 1966, Fresno native Ernie Palomino's own fdm, My 'Dip in cz '52 Ford, brought an end to Beat poetry and underground film. A coda to his own participation in Beat art and poetry in this period, the film can also be seen as a eulogy to the exten- sive and unacknowledged presence of Chicano writers and artists in and around that movement: Omar Salinas, Jose Montoya, John Rechy, Ernie Palomino, Luis Valdez, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, just to name a few. By the mid- 1960s then, most of these California artists would reject Beat disengagement and postwar avant-garde aesthetics in favor of the Chicano civil rights movement and an aesthetics rooted in cultural nation- alism. The connection between the Beat and Chicano art move- ments-one that can still be heard, for example, in any poem by Jose Montoya-never made it into the history books as scholars of each movement articulated self-contained and sui generis borders. Below I would like to consider some of what was missed in the process. Aztltcn 24:2 Fall 1999 1 Noriega The One Avant-Garde Since Luis Valdez’s I AmJoaquin ( 1969)-widely identified as the “first“ Chicano film-the notion of a Chicano cinema has been framed within the political discourse of the Chicano civil rights movement. As such, in the 1970s, filmmakers and col- lectives worked within a binarism of reform and revolution, on one hand advocating for access to US.television stations and film studios, whereas on the other hand theorizing their work as the “northernmost expression” of New Latin Ameri- can Cinema (Trevino 1984, 40). In the same period, however, a different type of Chicano film practice was taking shape that neither sought access to the industry (reform),nor rooted itself in a radical politics (revolution). Instead, these filmmakers produced low-budget films drawn from personal or local experience and situated within the context of the American avant-garde or “underground film. Inspired by Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1967) as well as regional screenings of avant-garde films, Chicanos were among the “fantastic num- bers of people” who started shooting and screening their own “underground” works as personal expressions in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Renan 1967, 181.’ Renan defined the underground film as a “dissent” located in personal expression and noncommercial practices: The underground film is a certain kind of film. It is a film conceived and made essentially by one person and is a personal statement by that person. It is a film that dissents radically in form, or in technique, or in content, or perhaps in all three. It is usually made for very little money, frequently under a thousand dollars, and its exhibition is outside commercial film channels. (17) Although the underground film has been faulted for its “repression of a materialist analysis of society and culture” in favor of disengagement, it nevertheless generated alternatives to Hollywood and society-at-large, most notably in Beat sub- culture, Warhol’s Factory, and the personal “art films” of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas, among others (James 1989, 99).2But given its antithetical positioning, as David James argues, underground film did not so much be- come an autonomous and authentic cinema as it did a 2 WhyChicanos Could Not Be Beat “countercultural activity” deeply engaged with and vulnerable to Hollywood (99-100). For Chicanos, however, things were not quite so simple, because their rejection of the commercial cinema would not be assimilated and commodified. Likewise, their participation within the avant-garde revealed the underlying limits of its stylistic and thematic heterogeneity. In both cases, what Chicanos came up against was the fact of racial homogene- ity. Perhaps for these reasons, then, Chicano “underground filmmakers often registered a critique of the very styles they used: Severo Perez (the trance film), Ernie Palomino (Beat poetic narrative), and Willie Varela (the lyrical film).3 Although scholars continue to locate the alternative “cinemas” of racial minorities either after or outside the underground, there has been a rediscovery of an increasing number of exceptions. These include Raphael Montatiez Ortiz’s recycled films of the late 1950s, Ernie Palomino’s My Trip in a ’52Ford (1966),William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.Take One (1968),Severo Perez’s A Day in the Life: Or Mozo, an Introduc- tion into the Duality of Orbital Indecision (1968), and Willie Varela’s personal films since the 1970~~~Still, several factors mitigate efforts to see avant-garde and ethnic cinemas as co- incident rather than as sequential, not the least of which is that these filmmakers’work does not appear to fit the cultural logic of later ethnic cinemas, but, rather, belongs to the exis- tential subjectivity of underground film. In fact, with the ex- ception of Ortiz and Varela, most of these filmmakers became “ethnic” by leaving the avant-garde and shifting to ethnic- identified documentary and narrative by the end of the 1960s. Palomino even goes so far as to identify his work up to My lYip in a ’52Ford as gabacho or white art-especially given its reliance on found-object sculpture and Beat poetry (Quirarte 1973, 96). He has taught in the La Raza Studies Department at Fresno State College since 1970. For his part, Perez moved to Los Angeles in 1971, where he briefly worked with Moctesuma Esparza, before turning to educational, science and medical films.5 In 1994, he wrote and directed ...And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him,a feature-length adaptation of the Tomas Rvera Their early work is worth considering, not for its failure to articulate a Chicano avant-garde practice, but for the ways in which it critically engages and participates in the unmarked avant-garde of its time. 3 Noriega “You Must Identify Yourself” Ernie Palomino’s My Trip in a ’52 Ford (1966) represents a summation of his so-called gabacho art between 1960 and 1965, during which the Fresno native studied art at San Fran- cisco State College. The film, his M.A. thesis project, uses Palomino’s found-object sculpture as characters in a Beat narrative set in San Francisco. The 26-minute film begins with Mary Go, a 1952 Ford, being driven by Palomino until she breaks down, whereupon she is liberated (“at last I’m free”) and her parts are reincarnated as various children: George Go, a “grotesque truck made from a radiator and golf bag: Dorothy Dresser, a prostitute; Carol Chair, a housewife: Steve Stove, a marijuana-smoking Beatnik and the Great Wild Bird, a messenger for the Great Go Father that is made from the hood of the ’52 Ford. The film follows the course of a day, pro- viding character sketches for each child, usually by having the previous child meet and comment on the next one, but also through poetic voice over descriptions. The Go children are identified as “ghosts”to their social and mechanical functions within the terms of traditional gender roles. Whereas George Go embraces functionalism, Steve Stove exemplifies Beat disengagement, proclaiming, “No hope-ah without dope-ah.” Dorothy Dresser and Carol Chair play their roles in relation- ship to male needs and desire~.~Despite their differences and even conflicts, the Go children assert their sameness insofar as their design and character are determined by the social roles they play: “We’re the same.” Only the Great Wild Bird claims to be the “true ghost” since it places form over function and “does not reflect a character” in its visual manifesta- tion: “We’re not the same.’’ The film’s denouement depicts scenes from different parts of San Francisco the next morning. Steve Stove is shown on a downtown sidewalk as white office workers walk past him in wonder. At a junkyard where black workers crush and cut up cars, Mary Go again proclaims, “At last I’m free, now I am go- ing as I please, soon we shall be one again.” Finally, on a build- ing rooftop, a “Chinese student” named Jesse Wong confronts a “Negro janitor” named Bill Chair (Carol’s husband). Wong, who is trying to reassemble Mary Go and her children into a trailer, sings, “My trailer is a sweet chariot coming for to carry them home.” When Bill calls him crazy, Jesse responds, “No we’re not, we’re the same, Bill Chair,” and the film ends. The 4 Why Chicanos Could Not Be Beat fact that the “Negrojanitor” is played by a white actor and the “Chinese student” is played by Palomino himself brings ra- cially defmed class difference into the film’s allegorical critique of form and function in relation to gender roles. These final scenes, then, provide the transition between the allegorical narrative and the closing credits that depict Palomino’s M.A. exhibition, locating Palomino-as-artist in the space between abstract formalism and allegorical commentary, but doing so in terms of the racial difference that troubles Beat social disengagement.

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